Between inequality and difference: the creole world in the twenty‐first century

A major theme in contemporary social theory is the questioning and destabilization of boundaries – self/other, culture/nature and gender being the most obvious areas. Not least for this reason, creole identities, ostensibly premised on openness and mixing, deserve renewed attention. Although the term creolization, as borrowed from linguistics, is sometimes used in a broad comparative sense, the creole world refers to the outcome of a particular historical experience, namely that of displacement, slavery, emancipation and its aftermath reverberating into the present. Key terms are uprootedness, cultural mixing and creole languages existing in diglossic situations with metropolitan ones. Creole intellectuals in the Caribbean have celebrated the cultural creativity characteristic of these societies but have been criticized for ignoring class, racism and gender issues. By embracing the egalitarianism and openness of creoledom, they have become vulnerable to criticism of being handmaidens of neoliberalism or neocolonialism. Controversies over creole identity are related to fundamental questions in anthropology. Drawing on material mainly from the Indian Ocean region, in this article I attempt to create a dialogue between debates over creole identity and theoretical questions raised in social and cultural theory concerning the relationship between cultural difference and social inequality.     

Ungrounding knowledges offshore Caribbean Studies,disciplinarity and critique

Abstract

This article considers how the field of Caribbean Studies constructed and defined its objects of study. It critically reflects on the history of the field, drawing mainly from the discipline of anthropology but also attending to the institutional sites of scholarly production and their impact on the worlding of the Caribbean as an 'area' fit for 'area studies'. As it does so, the paper considers the limits of the modes of fact-making implicit in Caribbean Studies, the scalar imaginaries bound up in it, and their implications for the problems of generalizability and distinctiveness subtending social inquiry and 'area' formations more broadly.